Gábor Bella

Also published as: Gabor Bella


2022

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How Universal is Metonymy? Results from a Large-Scale Multilingual Analysis
Temuulen Khishigsuren | Gábor Bella | Thomas Brochhagen | Daariimaa Marav | Fausto Giunchiglia | Khuyagbaatar Batsuren
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

Metonymy is regarded by most linguists as a universal cognitive phenomenon, especially since the emergence of the theory of conceptual mappings. However, the field data backing up claims of universality has not been large enough so far to provide conclusive evidence. We introduce a large-scale analysis of metonymy based on a lexical corpus of over 20 thousand metonymy instances from 189 languages and 69 genera. No prior study, to our knowledge, is based on linguistic coverage as broad as ours. Drawing on corpus analysis, evidence of universality is found at three levels: systematic metonymy in general, particular metonymy patterns, and specific metonymy concepts.

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UniMorph 4.0: Universal Morphology
Khuyagbaatar Batsuren | Omer Goldman | Salam Khalifa | Nizar Habash | Witold Kieraś | Gábor Bella | Brian Leonard | Garrett Nicolai | Kyle Gorman | Yustinus Ghanggo Ate | Maria Ryskina | Sabrina Mielke | Elena Budianskaya | Charbel El-Khaissi | Tiago Pimentel | Michael Gasser | William Abbott Lane | Mohit Raj | Matt Coler | Jaime Rafael Montoya Samame | Delio Siticonatzi Camaiteri | Esaú Zumaeta Rojas | Didier López Francis | Arturo Oncevay | Juan López Bautista | Gema Celeste Silva Villegas | Lucas Torroba Hennigen | Adam Ek | David Guriel | Peter Dirix | Jean-Philippe Bernardy | Andrey Scherbakov | Aziyana Bayyr-ool | Antonios Anastasopoulos | Roberto Zariquiey | Karina Sheifer | Sofya Ganieva | Hilaria Cruz | Ritván Karahóǧa | Stella Markantonatou | George Pavlidis | Matvey Plugaryov | Elena Klyachko | Ali Salehi | Candy Angulo | Jatayu Baxi | Andrew Krizhanovsky | Natalia Krizhanovskaya | Elizabeth Salesky | Clara Vania | Sardana Ivanova | Jennifer White | Rowan Hall Maudslay | Josef Valvoda | Ran Zmigrod | Paula Czarnowska | Irene Nikkarinen | Aelita Salchak | Brijesh Bhatt | Christopher Straughn | Zoey Liu | Jonathan North Washington | Yuval Pinter | Duygu Ataman | Marcin Wolinski | Totok Suhardijanto | Anna Yablonskaya | Niklas Stoehr | Hossep Dolatian | Zahroh Nuriah | Shyam Ratan | Francis M. Tyers | Edoardo M. Ponti | Grant Aiton | Aryaman Arora | Richard J. Hatcher | Ritesh Kumar | Jeremiah Young | Daria Rodionova | Anastasia Yemelina | Taras Andrushko | Igor Marchenko | Polina Mashkovtseva | Alexandra Serova | Emily Prud’hommeaux | Maria Nepomniashchaya | Fausto Giunchiglia | Eleanor Chodroff | Mans Hulden | Miikka Silfverberg | Arya D. McCarthy | David Yarowsky | Ryan Cotterell | Reut Tsarfaty | Ekaterina Vylomova
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation, and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements on several fronts that were made in the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 66 new languages, including 24 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g., missing gender and macrons information. We have amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet.

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Using Linguistic Typology to Enrich Multilingual Lexicons: the Case of Lexical Gaps in Kinship
Temuulen Khishigsuren | Gábor Bella | Khuyagbaatar Batsuren | Abed Alhakim Freihat | Nandu Chandran Nair | Amarsanaa Ganbold | Hadi Khalilia | Yamini Chandrashekar | Fausto Giunchiglia
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper describes a method to enrich lexical resources with content relating to linguistic diversity, based on knowledge from the field of lexical typology. We capture the phenomenon of diversity through the notion of lexical gap and use a systematic method to infer gaps semi-automatically on a large scale, which we demonstrate on the kinship domain. The resulting free diversity-aware terminological resource consists of 198 concepts, 1,911 words, and 37,370 gaps in 699 languages. We see great potential in the use of resources such as ours for the improvement of a variety of cross-lingual NLP tasks, which we illustrate through an application in the evaluation of machine translation systems.

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IndoUKC: A Concept-Centered Indian Multilingual Lexical Resource
Nandu Chandran Nair | Rajendran S. Velayuthan | Yamini Chandrashekar | Gábor Bella | Fausto Giunchiglia
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We introduce the IndoUKC, a new multilingual lexical database comprised of eighteen Indian languages, with a focus on formally capturing words and word meanings specific to Indian languages and cultures. The IndoUKC reuses content from the existing IndoWordNet resource while providing a new model for the cross-lingual mapping of lexical meanings that allows for a richer, diversity-aware representation. Accordingly, beyond a thorough syntactic and semantic cleaning, the IndoWordNet lexical content has been thoroughly remodeled in order to allow a more precise expression of language-specific meaning. The resulting database is made available both for browsing through a graphical web interface and for download through the LiveLanguage data catalogue.

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Language Diversity: Visible to Humans, Exploitable by Machines
Gábor Bella | Erdenebileg Byambadorj | Yamini Chandrashekar | Khuyagbaatar Batsuren | Danish Cheema | Fausto Giunchiglia
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

The Universal Knowledge Core (UKC) is a large multilingual lexical database with a focus on language diversity and covering over two thousand languages. The aim of the database, as well as its tools and data catalogue, is to make the abstract notion of linguistic diversity visually understandable for humans and formally exploitable by machines. The UKC website lets users explore millions of individual words and their meanings, but also phenomena of cross-lingual convergence and divergence, such as shared interlingual meanings, lexicon similarities, cognate clusters, or lexical gaps. The UKC LiveLanguage Catalogue, in turn, provides access to the underlying lexical data in a computer-processable form, ready to be reused in cross-lingual applications.

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The SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task on Morpheme Segmentation
Khuyagbaatar Batsuren | Gábor Bella | Aryaman Arora | Viktor Martinovic | Kyle Gorman | Zdeněk Žabokrtský | Amarsanaa Ganbold | Šárka Dohnalová | Magda Ševčíková | Kateřina Pelegrinová | Fausto Giunchiglia | Ryan Cotterell | Ekaterina Vylomova
Proceedings of the 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

The SIGMORPHON 2022 shared task on morpheme segmentation challenged systems to decompose a word into a sequence of morphemes and covered most types of morphology: compounds, derivations, and inflections. Subtask 1, word-level morpheme segmentation, covered 5 million words in 9 languages (Czech, English, Spanish, Hungarian, French, Italian, Russian, Latin, Mongolian) and received 13 system submissions from 7 teams and the best system averaged 97.29% F1 score across all languages, ranging English (93.84%) to Latin (99.38%). Subtask 2, sentence-level morpheme segmentation, covered 18,735 sentences in 3 languages (Czech, English, Mongolian), received 10 system submissions from 3 teams, and the best systems outperformed all three state-of-the-art subword tokenization methods (BPE, ULM, Morfessor2) by 30.71% absolute. To facilitate error analysis and support any type of future studies, we released all system predictions, the evaluation script, and all gold standard datasets.

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SIGMORPHONUniMorph 2022 Shared Task 0: Generalization and Typologically Diverse Morphological Inflection
Jordan Kodner | Salam Khalifa | Khuyagbaatar Batsuren | Hossep Dolatian | Ryan Cotterell | Faruk Akkus | Antonios Anastasopoulos | Taras Andrushko | Aryaman Arora | Nona Atanalov | Gábor Bella | Elena Budianskaya | Yustinus Ghanggo Ate | Omer Goldman | David Guriel | Simon Guriel | Silvia Guriel-Agiashvili | Witold Kieraś | Andrew Krizhanovsky | Natalia Krizhanovsky | Igor Marchenko | Magdalena Markowska | Polina Mashkovtseva | Maria Nepomniashchaya | Daria Rodionova | Karina Scheifer | Alexandra Sorova | Anastasia Yemelina | Jeremiah Young | Ekaterina Vylomova
Proceedings of the 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

The 2022 SIGMORPHON–UniMorph shared task on large scale morphological inflection generation included a wide range of typologically diverse languages: 33 languages from 11 top-level language families: Arabic (Modern Standard), Assamese, Braj, Chukchi, Eastern Armenian, Evenki, Georgian, Gothic, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hungarian, Itelmen, Karelian, Kazakh, Ket, Khalkha Mongolian, Kholosi, Korean, Lamahalot, Low German, Ludic, Magahi, Middle Low German, Old English, Old High German, Old Norse, Polish, Pomak, Slovak, Turkish, Upper Sorbian, Veps, and Xibe. We emphasize generalization along different dimensions this year by evaluating test items with unseen lemmas and unseen features separately under small and large training conditions. Across the five submitted systems and two baselines, the prediction of inflections with unseen features proved challenging, with average performance decreased substantially from last year. This was true even for languages for which the forms were in principle predictable, which suggests that further work is needed in designing systems that capture the various types of generalization required for the world’s languages.

2021

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MorphyNet: a Large Multilingual Database of Derivational and Inflectional Morphology
Khuyagbaatar Batsuren | Gábor Bella | Fausto Giunchiglia
Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Large-scale morphological databases provide essential input to a wide range of NLP applications. Inflectional data is of particular importance for morphologically rich (agglutinative and highly inflecting) languages, and derivations can be used, e.g. to infer the semantics of out-of-vocabulary words. Extending the scope of state-of-the-art multilingual morphological databases, we announce the release of MorphyNet, a high-quality resource with 15 languages, 519k derivational and 10.1M inflectional entries, and a rich set of morphological features. MorphyNet was extracted from Wiktionary using both hand-crafted and automated methods, and was manually evaluated to be of a precision higher than 98%. Both the resource generation logic and the resulting database are made freely available and are reusable as stand-alone tools or in combination with existing resources.

2020

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A Major Wordnet for a Minority Language: Scottish Gaelic
Gábor Bella | Fiona McNeill | Rody Gorman | Caoimhin O Donnaile | Kirsty MacDonald | Yamini Chandrashekar | Abed Alhakim Freihat | Fausto Giunchiglia
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present a new wordnet resource for Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic minority language spoken by about 60,000 speakers, most of whom live in Northwestern Scotland. The wordnet contains over 15 thousand word senses and was constructed by merging ten thousand new, high-quality translations, provided and validated by language experts, with an existing wordnet derived from Wiktionary. This new, considerably extended wordnet—currently among the 30 largest in the world—targets multiple communities: language speakers and learners; linguists; computer scientists solving problems related to natural language processing. By publishing it as a freely downloadable resource, we hope to contribute to the long-term preservation of Scottish Gaelic as a living language, both offline and on the Web.

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Exploring the Language of Data
Gábor Bella | Linda Gremes | Fausto Giunchiglia
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We set out to uncover the unique grammatical properties of an important yet so far under-researched type of natural language text: that of short labels typically found within structured datasets. We show that such labels obey a specific type of abbreviated grammar that we call the Language of Data, with properties significantly different from the kinds of text typically addressed in computational linguistics and NLP, such as ‘standard’ written language or social media messages. We analyse orthography, parts of speech, and syntax over a large, bilingual, hand-annotated corpus of data labels collected from a variety of domains. We perform experiments on tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition over real-world structured data, demonstrating that models adapted to the Language of Data outperform those trained on standard text. These observations point in a new direction to be explored as future research, in order to develop new NLP tools and models dedicated to the Language of Data.

2019

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CogNet: A Large-Scale Cognate Database
Khuyagbaatar Batsuren | Gabor Bella | Fausto Giunchiglia
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper introduces CogNet, a new, large-scale lexical database that provides cognates -words of common origin and meaning- across languages. The database currently contains 3.1 million cognate pairs across 338 languages using 35 writing systems. The paper also describes the automated method by which cognates were computed from publicly available wordnets, with an accuracy evaluated to 94%. Finally, it presents statistics about the cognate data and some initial insights into it, hinting at a possible future exploitation of the resource by various fields of lingustics.

2018

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Using Crowd Agreement for Wordnet Localization
Amarsanaa Ganbold | Altangerel Chagnaa | Gábor Bella
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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